In many signal processing applications, different signals are often corrupted with noise. This noise may include such things as background sounds, disturbances, interference, cross-talk, or any unwanted addition to a recorded signal. Accordingly, in order to enhance the signals, it is desirable to reduce or eliminate this noise. In speech communication processing, signal processing for noise reduction is often called speech enhancement.
Blind source separation (BSS) can be used to restore independent source signals using multiple independent signal mixtures of the source signals. In order to separate two signals, two or more sensors are needed to generate independent signal mixtures. Each sensor is placed at a different location, and each sensor records a signal, which is a mixture of the source signals. The recorded signals are independent from one another, however, because the sensors record the information at different locations. BSS algorithms may be used to separate signals by exploiting these signal differences, which manifest the spatial diversity of the common information that was recorded by both sensors. In speech communication processing, the different sensors may comprise microphones that are placed at different locations relative to the source of the speech that is being recorded.